A book like this should start with a disclaimer. At least, that seems to be the convention. Introducing Musical Elaborations (1991), a series of lectures in critical theory that he had given at the University of California, Edward W. Said makes clear that his volume ‘is meant as neither a contribution to systematic musicology nor a series of literary essays about music as it relates to literature’.

The same could be said of this book which, like Said's, started life as a series of ‘three consecutive lectures’ given in a nonmusicological context, in this case as the University of Newcastle's 2009 Poetry Lectures. On those three evenings I was speaking to an audience defined by their interest in poetry, and our lack of musicological common ground – even, our common lack of musicological ground – was one pole of the discursive space I tried to open up. The attempt was to think about music on behalf of poetry.

Also as in the lectures that became Said's Musical Elaborations, this created a particular, perhaps unconventional, focus of thought, and has led to the kind of book that transgresses tribal certainties by no means unique to musicologists. Said's Introduction identifies his standpoint as:

His ‘much to do with music’ had been as a regular music columnist for The Nation. He goes on to identify precisely this as one of the most useful standpoints for thinking about music:

I too am interested in writing that ‘sees itself as a humanistic discipline’. Mine, though, is not a book about music per se, and I certainly don't claim it's the best way to think about that artform.

I am, in so many ways, not Edward Said. Unlike him, I'm neither a cultural critic nor a musical amateur. In Elaborations Said uses the latter term carefully, although also in its conventional sense, to suggest a kind of powerless devotion to ‘an onslaught of such refinement, articulation and technique as almost to constitute a sadomasochistic experience’.